Celebrating a new Aphra tale, particularly one featuring denim, is a cause for huge celebration around here. I love Aphra and her adventures!

I grew up in Calgary, Alberta, and as the Stampede capital of the world, blue jeans were just a part of everyday life. As an author, though I didn't really stop to think about it until today, virtually all of my main characters wear jeans at one time or another. In my very first book SEEDS OF TIME, the way the main character discovers she has travelled back more than 600 years in time is when she looks down and sees she is no longer wearing her jeans -- they have been replaced by a long skirt of thick, brown wool.

In my new book -- also a time travel story -- Darby Christopher is wearing her favourite jeans when she walks through a stone window -- except, in this case, because it is mid-summer, they are cut-offs. But when she finds herself suddenly in the dark, kneeling on something cold and crunchy, she knows that something BIG has gone wrong:

With the snow under her knees came a realization. She must have fallen asleep. There’s no way this could be anything except a dream. The kind of dream where you find yourself in a place that you’ve never been before, but is somehow familiar.That had to be the explanation. There she was, on her hands and knees in some kind of crunchy snow in the middle of the summer, wisps of fog swirling and fading all around. The only thing to do was to head for the beam of sunlight that gleamed like a beacon ahead. The sun grew brighter and the air was suddenly sparkling like prisms – pretty painful on the eyes – but Darby had never been so happy to see daylight in her life. She crawled as fast as she could toward the source of the light. If there was a record for the fastest crawl through snow in cut-offs, Darby was determined to break it. The strangely glittering ceiling suddenly dropped, but after two head bumps in as many minutes, she just ducked down and beetled straight for the light.By the time Darby got the nerve up to lift her head again, she realized she had crawled nearly twenty feet past the end of whatever weird tunnel she’d been in. And when she did look up, she wished she hadn’t. Around her was a world of white...

To celebrate Aphra's return in DEATH BY DENIM, I've got two copies of Darby's story A WALK THROUGH A WINDOW to give away. To win, just leave your name in the comments below. And if you'd like to read Darby's blog, you can find it HERE at Darby Speaks. Maybe I'll see you there!